Gunter Grass - The Flounder

In the year 1498 after the incarnation of our Lord, when, thanks to an Arab helmsman's knowledge of the winds and ocean currents, the Portuguese admiral Vasco da Gama finally sighted land and put ashore in Calicut, thus opening the sea route to India with all its still-tangled skein of consequences, a girl child was born in the Wicker Bastion, the erstwhile Pomorshian settlement, by then a part of the Old City of Danzig, to the blacksmith Peter Rusch by his wife, Kristin, who then promptly died. The little girl was born on Saint Martin's Day, for which reason whole flocks of geese later grew cold under Fat Gret's plucking fingers.

Beginning at the age of twelve, Margret stood in the kitchen of Saint Bridget's Convent in the Old City, cleaning turnips, scaling carp, husking rye, and cutting tripe into finger-long strips, for the Flounder had advised blacksmith Rusch (or, in my then time-phase, me) to put this superfluous girl into a convent as soon as possible; for which reason the Women's Tribunal has asked the overbearing flatfish questions that he will answer elsewhere. In any case Margarete became a novice at the age of sixteen and took her solemn vows in the very year when, with sturdy hammer, the monk Luther nailed up his theses.

As a full-fledged nun who soon presided over the convent kitchen, Margret (known at an early age as Fat Gret) began

to cook outside the house as soon as the widely ramified affairs of the Brigittine nuns called for her kitchen diplomacy. When Jakob Hegge preached Lutheranism on the Hagels-berg, she, at the foot of the hill, cooked Counter Reformation tripe and fish soups for the crowds that gathered there. And when I, the runaway Franciscan monk, became her kitchen boy and, when she so pleased, bed companion, we cooked for that archenemy of the guilds, Mayor Eberhard Ferber, sometimes in his patrician house on Long Street, sometimes on his Island farm, and sometimes in his starosty at Dirschau, where he took refuge, for so hated was Ferber by the coopers, drapers, dockers, and butchers that he often had to flee the city.

Just when Vasco da Gama the Portuguese viceroy was dying of plague, yellow fever, or Dominican poison in Cochin in southern India, Ferber was deposed as mayor. Led by blacksmith Rusch, Hegge's increasing following had risen up and taken over the city government, though for only a short time. The following year King Sigismund of Poland marched against the city with eight thousand men and occupied it without a fight. The "Statuta Sigismundi" were posted. Ferber was restored to power. A trial was held.

Before her father was executed, the abbess Margret Rusch cooked his favorite dish for him; then she moved in with the embittered Eberhard Ferber, who, no sooner reinstated as mayor, retired to his next-to-last dwelling place in Dirschau. Three years later — Fat Gret was still cooking for him — he died, leaving several pieces of Old City real estate, his sheep farm in Praust, and various properties on the Island to her convent. Altogether, the cooking nun Margret added so much to the wealth of the Brigittine order with her free-ranging outside cookery that she soon gained the stature of a true abbess, both respected and feared, even though she was widely reputed to keep a houseful of bedworthy kitchen boys and to be an out-and-out slut.

Because I was always with her. She took me in — me or one of the little Franciscan monks who kept running away from Holy Trinity — buried me in her flesh, and resurrected me, acclimated me to the warmth of the stable, covered me with her fat like a meat pasty, kept me as contented as a well-fed baby, and in quickly changing seasons wore me out. Whether the Reformers were on top in the outside world

or whether the Dominican Counter Reformation was turning every poor sinner's words inside out, Margret's box bed preserved a sultry vapor that the Flounder, addressing the Women's Tribunal, characterized as "strictly pagan."

"If it is permissible," he said, "to call a revolution cozy, then one may say that the revolutionary doings in the bed of Abbess Margarete Rusch took place in cozily warmed areas of freedom." And I, too, proved to my Ilsebill that in those days only nuns could possibly pass for emancipated women, free from irksome conjugal duties, free from the state of childishness induced by male domination, never made fools of by fashion, always protected by sisterly solidarity based on their betrothal to the heavenly bridegroom, deluded by no earthly love, secure through economic power, feared even by the Dominicans, always cheerful and well informed. Mother Rusch was an enlightened woman and, in addition, so fat that her pregnancies went almost unnoticed.

She bore two daughters. While traveling, on the road, as it were. Some barn was always available for her confinements. But never was I permitted to speak of fatherhood, father's duties, or father's rights. "There's only one father," she said, breaking into a shattering laugh, "and that's our sweet Lord, who's supposed to be up there in heaven."

And she didn't care a bit if strait-laced Protestants or Catholics thought the two girls, both of whom were brought up in the Wicker Bastion by Fat Gret's sisters, showed a resemblance sometimes to Preacher Hegge, sometimes to the patrician Ferber, and sometimes even to a no-good Franciscan monk. As far as she was concerned, fathers were all ridiculous. She called the married women in their bourgeois stables "dressed-up mares" who had to hold still for their stallions, whereas she could make use of her little pouch as she saw fit. Moreover, Fat Gret did not hold still, but jounced so heavily on her soon exhausted bed companion that she often knocked my wind out. She really crushed me. When it was over, I lay there as white as chalk, like a corpse. She had to rub me with vinegar water to revive me.

She may well have stopped the autocratic Eberhard Fer-ber's breath the same way, smothered the old goat under her bed weight. For she was not content just to cook for her sue-

cession of males. She also had to have her fun, her play and entertainment, all of which may strike a puritanical mind as obscene.

And so Abbess Margarete Rusch solved the bitterly earnest question of the century, the question of how to serve up the bread and wine, the Lord's Supper, in her own way, to wit, bedwise, by acrobatically moving her twat into the vertical and offering it as a chalice, which was then filled with red wine. Bread demanded to be dipped. Or consecrated wafers. Here the question-is this really flesh and blood, or only its sign and symbol-did not arise. The paper quarrel of the theologians became irrelevant. Ambiguities were over and done with. Never did I take Communion more devoutly. How simple Margret made the oblation and transubstantia-tion for me. With what childlike faith I immersed myself in the great mystery. Luckily no Dominican eye ever spied on our bed masses.

Ah, if only this home custom had become practical religion for papists and Lutherans, Mennonites and Calvinists! But, torn by discord, they cut one another down. They let their quarrel over the right table arrangements cost them long-drawn-out military campaigns, pillage, rapine, and the devastation of lovely countrysides. But to this day they have gone on fighting and gouging one another, living without mutual affection, and with morose morality condemning Fat Gret's chalice as sinful. Yet Margret was pious. Even for the most fleeting pleasure she thanked God with a prayer.

Two years after the Peace of Augsburg, when His Polish Majesty Sigismund Augustus also proved willing at least to tolerate Communion in both kinds, the majority of the burghers of Danzig decided in favor of Luther's table arrangements, and from then on quarreled only with the Calvinists and Mennonites. Thereupon, after ruling for twenty-seven years, Abbess Rusch declared herself weary of office and asked her sisters of the Brigittine Order for leave to retire as abbess and once again to make herself useful outside the convent as a cooking nun.